George Clooney has been sneaking outside to smoke.
Not like his friend Barack Obama used to, when he was running for US president and his wife, Michelle, was after him to quit. Clooney doesn’t even like smoking.
“I had to get better at inhaling,” he says. “I go outside so the kids don’t see and smoke a little bit.” He plans to switch to herbal cigarettes when he makes his Broadway debut next month in a stage adaptation of his 2005 movie Good Night, and Good Luck.
Smoking has been unpleasant, he says, because in his Kentucky clan “eight uncles and aunts all died of lung cancer – it’s a big deal.” He notes that his aunt Rosemary Clooney, the torch singer and movie star, was 74 when she died in 2002 from complications of lung cancer. “My dad’s the only one that didn’t smoke, and he’s 91.”
Clooney, looking slender in a black Theory shirt and navy pants, sits on a rose-coloured couch at Casa Cipriani, a hotel at the bottom of Manhattan. He will sit there for the next five hours, until the sun sets over the bay, not bothering with lunch, not looking at his phone, not checking with his minders, just spinning ensorcelling tales about love, Hollywood and politics like a modern-day Scheherazade.
Unlike in the film, where he took on the non-smoking role of Fred Friendly, producer of CBS newsman Edward R Murrow, on Broadway Clooney will play Murrow, who had a three-pack-a-day habit and died in 1965 at the age of 57 of complications from lung cancer. A decade before his death, Murrow was one of the first to report on links between smoking and lung cancer on his show See It Now. It was the rare episode in which he didn’t light up.
When Clooney directed his acclaimed movie, antismoking organisations chided him about David Strathairn’s Murrow character incessantly smoking.
“I was like, ‘Well, they all died of lung cancer – you can’t not do what is factually true,’” he recalls. His interest in what is factually true – and how Americans no longer start with the same fact base – has led him back to a time when the country regarded some top TV news people as moral authorities.
Murrow bonded with radio listeners during the second World War by broadcasting from London amid the Blitz, and then with early television watchers interviewing celebrated figures such as John F Kennedy and Eleanor Roosevelt, plus Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz on the set of I Love Lucy. On See It Now, Murrow challenged the powerful – most famously Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin senator whose name became an “ism” when he indiscriminately smeared and spewed poison, falsely accusing people of being communists.
“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty ... We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason,” Murrow said in his attack on McCarthy, which came a few months before lawyer Joseph Welch uttered his “Have you no sense of decency?” line during the Army-McCarthy hearings.
Clooney and his long-time collaborator Grant Heslov wrote the movie and the play. They had conceived of the movie as a live production for CBS, like Clooney’s redo in 2000 of the Henry Fonda movie Fail Safe.
“I was always excited by the risk of no net,” says Clooney, who also lobbied to do a live episode of ER when he played dreamboat Dr Doug Ross on the NBC hit. But after Justin Timberlake tore Janet Jackson’s costume and exposed her breast during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show, CBS executives lost their taste for taking risks with live TV. Clooney had to mortgage his house to help finance the black-and-white film, which received six Oscar nominations, including for best screenplay.
Clooney had intended to play Murrow but, after the table reading, he told Heslov, “I don’t have the gravitas.” Heslov agreed. Murrow had “the weight of the world on his shoulders”, Heslov says in a phone interview, “and at that time George didn’t have it.”
Now, two decades later, at 63, Clooney is ready. “I always felt like there was a sadness to Murrow, and that was not something that you could associate with me at 40 years old,” he says. Now he has to turn back the clock and cover his salt-and-pepper mane with black dye.
“My wife is going to hate it because nothing makes you look older than when an older guy dyes his hair,” he says. “My kids are going to just laugh at me nonstop.”
As for bringing the story to life for theatregoers, Clooney says the stage will be transformed into a newsroom with about 30 monitors moving around, showing old footage. David Cromer, the play’s Tony award-winning director, enlisted video and projection designer David Bengali to help, as Cromer puts it, “recreate what it’s like to watch television being made”.
“We’re going to do it onstage with cameras and live feed to mix with the real footage,” Cromer continues, “so you’ll see George, and then you’ll see Joseph McCarthy, and you’ll see George, and you’ll see Joseph McCarthy.”
Clooney says : “McCarthy is still played by McCarthy, which I’m fairly sure he’s going to get a Tony for.” He recounts that before the film’s release, preview audiences complained that “the guy playing McCarthy was overacting”.
Clooney and Heslov started out together as actors in Los Angeles, doing plays in tiny theatres. One called The Biz, directed by Clooney’s cousin Miguel Ferrer, was about actors trying to make it. And Clooney acted in a play about Sid Vicious called Vicious in 1986 that took him to Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. He hasn’t trod the boards since then.
People may think he’s a nepo baby, but he’s not really. It was a long, hard climb. When he got to Hollywood, he was a driver for his Rosemary Clooney and her coterie of singers. “They would call themselves ‘broads’,” he says. “They would drink tall glasses of vodka. They were really tough and mean and raunchy. And when they got up to sing, they were unbelievably gifted.”
When people tell him it looks like it comes easily to him, he says, “It comes easy because I work really damn hard. Part of the art of doing what we do for a living is, it’s supposed to look easy.”
Almost four decades later, Heslov and Clooney walked onstage at the Winter Garden Theatre, where the show starts previews on March 12th. Heslov says, “We were both, like, ‘Wow!’”
The thought of being on Broadway, Clooney concedes, is daunting – though he has got some moral support from his former ER love interest Julianna Margulies, who just wrapped her own Broadway run in Delia Ephron’s Left on Tenth.
“I’m terrified of it,” he says. “Are you kidding? I’m doing 11 monologues. When you get older, your recall isn’t the same. When I was doing ER, it was 12 pages of medical dialogue. You look at it in the morning and you say, ‘Okay, let’s go!’ Now you get older and you’re going, ‘What’s wrong with me? Well, don’t drink any wine tonight.’”
He says he co-wrote the movie as a critique of most of the press rolling over in advance of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Clooney called out US president George W Bush for the misbegotten war, and he was called a traitor for being against it.
“It was a pretty tough time,” he recalls.
The movie, he says, was really about “we need the press” because “government unchecked is a problem”.
Now, with Donald Trump throwing Washington into a tumult, Clooney says, we are living through a time when “you take a narrative; you make it up; don’t worry about facts; don’t worry about repercussions”. He says the play “feels more like it’s about truth, not just the press. Facts matter.”
Certainly, there are unavoidable echoes of McCarthy’s Washington in Trump’s Washington, a place rife with “alternative facts”, as Kellyanne Conway called them, as well as conspiracy theories, reckless attacks and punitive measures. The White House, for example, wants government employees to snitch on colleagues who are promoting diversity, equity and inclusion programmes. Associated Press journalists were barred from covering some White House events because the news outlet refused to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.
“No rules count any more,” Clooney says. “It’s like letting an infant walk across the 405 freeway in the middle of the afternoon.”
He stops, preferring to keep it positive. “I believe that whole idea of the arc of history bending toward justice, and I know it doesn’t feel that way right now,” he says. “I think there are always these pendulum swings. The first Trump election was, I believe, a result of eight years of a black president.”
As for Trump’s 2024 election, he says: “The Biden administration was terrible at explaining that we’re a world economy, where we were actually doing better than all the other G7 countries. They were bad at telling the story because their messenger was not working at his best, to say the least.”
He doesn’t know if the audience will see his play as a critique of Trump. “I think they are going to like hearing the conversations about us at our best,” he says. “Murrow represented us at our best.”
The star who was once christened People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive says that, in his footloose bachelor days, he met Trump. “He was a New York guy,” Clooney says. “He’d be at a restaurant, and he’d be like, ‘What’s the name of that cocktail waitress?’” Trump even suggested a doctor who might help Clooney with an injury he had suffered on the set of Syriana, the film that netted him a best supporting actor Oscar.
He adds: “We’ve got to hope that he can have that Scrooge night where he wakes up, and there are some ghosts of Christmas there that say, ‘There’s some good things you can do for people.’”
Clooney has been wooed by some top Democrats to run for president. Would he ever jump in?
“No,” he says, somewhat convincingly.
In a world with few moral authorities, Clooney harks back not only to Murrow but also to his father, Nick Clooney, an anchorman in Kentucky and later an AMC host, who would call out people at dinner if they belittled anybody or said anything bigoted, and then leave the table. , “I would always be like, ‘Well, can’t you just not hear, so we can finish eating?’” recalls Clooney. “The truth is, of course, he was right. He and my mom taught us, ‘You’ve got to do it when it’s uncomfortable.’”
His father liked to stand on a chair and recite Murrow’s “wires and lights in a box” speech, about how television was becoming not a tool to inform but a toy to distract – an argument that augured the internet age. Now the tech moguls have superseded the network moguls; they control communication – and to a large extent emotions – in the US. Clooney, who has no social media presence, says he sees “a lot of cowardice” as the tech moguls bow to Trump.
Parts of that speech have been incorporated into the script, he says. Murrow warned: “This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and even it can inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise, it’s nothing but wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference.”
In another addition to the play, CBS founder William S Paley worries that Murrow is editorialising about McCarthy. Murrow replies: “I simply cannot accept that there are, on every story, two equal and logical sides to an argument.” Paley says that Murrow is opening the door.
“What happens when it’s not Edward R Murrow minding the store but Tucker Carlson?” Clooney says, referring to the far-right commentator. “It’s a funny thing how really good and important moments can also open the door for really awful things.”
Clooney has tried to inculcate his father’s values. He struggled for years to bring awareness to the conflict and the famine in Darfur. Amid other charity work, he started the Clooney Foundation for Justice with his wife, Amal, a human rights lawyer, to “wage justice” and help victims of human rights abuses, while dropping the hammer on perpetrators.
In June 2024, Clooney and Obama appeared at a glittery LA fundraiser that raised $28 million for US president Joe Biden. When Biden appeared to freeze onstage, Obama led him away. Clooney was gobsmacked.
“I saw him for hours a year earlier at the Kennedy Center, and I saw someone much less sharp” that night, Clooney says. “I’ve always liked Joe Biden, and I like him still.”
But after Biden’s debate meltdown, Clooney wrote a guest essay for the New York Times urging Biden to step aside. People thought Obama was behind it, but Clooney said he did it despite being urged not to. Many Democrats were grateful to Clooney, who said publicly what they were panicking about in private. Biden, then 81, had promised to be “a bridge” but was stubbornly clinging to power. Biden’s cordon sanitaire at the White House and some other Democrats, however, were angry at the actor. The piece sparked a debate about whether celebrities should have such high-profile roles in a party that is already perceived as rich, coastal and out of touch.
Biden abdicated his responsibility by hiding his incapacities, Clooney tells me, and “the media, in many ways, dropped the ball”.
Trump mocked Clooney on Truth Social, writing in part: “Clooney should get out of politics and go back to television. Movies never really worked for him!!!”
In a September interview with Jimmy Kimmel, Clooney quipped, in reply to Trump’s suggestion: “I will if he does.”
I note that Trump lobbied to play the president in Sharknado 3, shortly before he began his real-life quest.
Clooney deadpans: “All I can say on that subject is, he’s got a star on Hollywood Boulevard. I don’t.”
Clooney arrived in New York in late January with Amal and their seven-year-old twins, Alexander and Ella. They have a place in England and a home in Kentucky near his parents, who just celebrated their 65th wedding anniversary. But their main residence is now a farm in France.
“Growing up in Kentucky, all I wanted to do was get away from a farm, get away from that life,” he says. “Now I find myself back in that life. I drive a tractor and all those things. It’s the best chance of a normal life.”
Though it is “tricky” to take a stroll through Central Park, he says he is enjoying the city and being able to take his kids to school.
“My son’s favourite hero is Batman. I’m like, ‘You know I was Batman.’ He’s like, ‘Not really.’ I go, ‘You have no idea how right you are.’ If he knew that I was that Batman, he’d never have respect for me.” Clooney has apologised for his role as the Batman with nipples. “I was terrible in it,” he told GQ.
Heslov says that Clooney has made sure to keep his old friends close, so he isn’t surrounded by sycophants. He adds that Clooney’s twins have had a “profound” effect on him, making him “more comfortable” and helping him realise he should “take the time to enjoy things”.
Clooney is excited about his starring role in a new Noah Baumbach movie, Jay Kelly, in which he plays a movie star beloved by everyone but his kids. He and Brad Pitt are about to do another Oceans film. In this one, Clooney says wryly, “it’s like we’re all too old to do the jobs we used to be able to do”.
He notes that he had a longer career as a leading man because there wasn’t a rush of them clamouring to bump his generation of stars off their thrones.
“It gave Pitt, myself and a few of us room to continue working,” he says. “Some guys have hit recently, like Glen Powell and stuff, where I go, ‘That guy’s going to have a really good career.’”
And how was the transition from glamorous bachelor to husband and father?
“I wasn’t really in the market for being a dad,” he said. “Then I met Amal, and we fell in love. I have to say that, after that, everything made sense.”
He met her when she and a friend stopped by his house in Lake Como on the way to the Cannes Film Festival.
Before she arrived, his agent, Bryan Lourd, who had met her, said: “I’m telling you, you’re going to marry her.” But he didn’t trust Lourd’s taste. “Then Amal walked in. I was like, ‘Oh, my God!’ Then I didn’t really think I’d have much of a chance with her because I was 17 years older, and she seemed to have everything she needed.”
When they were both in London a few months later – he was scoring a movie, and she was negotiating with the Muslim Brotherhood to protect women’s rights in Egypt’s new constitution – he invited her to watch him score. “I thought, well, if you’re ever going to impress anybody, it’s with the London Symphony Orchestra at Abbey Road.”
Why isn’t he threatened by his wife’s success?
“I’m proud to be in the same room with her,” he says. “I’m proud to be her husband. I’m proud to be the father of kids with her.”
Clooney is conscious of time passing. “I had this conversation with Amal when I turned 60,” he says. “I said, ‘Look, I can still play full-court basketball. I can still run around. I can still do pretty much everything I did when I was 30. But in 30 years, I’m 90. That’s a real number. My dad just hit that. And there are some things you’re not doing no matter how many granola bars you eat. We have to focus on the next 20, 25 years of making sure that we’re jamming in everything we can.’ Not just work, because no one at the end of their life goes, ‘God, I wish I worked more.’”
He gets more contemplative. “There’s a thing about finding the person that you needed to find, particularly at a certain age, and everything from then on is easy.
“We renovated our house,” he continues. “Amal would go, ‘I want to paint this wall yellow.’ Well, if I was 27 years old and doing construction work, I would’ve been like, ‘Well, that’s a stupid colour.’ But the truth of the matter is that at 60, you just go, ‘Okay.’ There are so many things that would have caused friction that don’t.”
Clooney may not like yellow walls, but he’s staying sunny. “I got the brass ring,” he said. “It all worked out. If I go outside and I get hit by a bus tomorrow, I’d be okay.” – This article originally appeared in The New York Times
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